Development of an Interactive Tool based on Combining Graph Heuristic with Local Search for Examination Timetable Problem

Ashis Kumar Mandal

doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2020.0110385

Abstract

Every university faces a lot of challenges to solve the examination timetabling problem because the problem is NP-hard and contains numerous institutional constraints. Although several attempts have been taken to address the issue, there are scarcities of interactive and automated tools in this domain that can schedule exams effectively by considering institutional resources, different constraints, and student enrolment in courses. This paper presents the development of a system as a graphical and interactive tool for examination timetabling problem. To develop the system, combining graph coloring heuristic and local search meta-heuristic algorithms are employed. The graph heuris-tic ordering is incorporated for constructing initial solution(s), whereas the local search meta-heuristic algorithms are used to produce quality exam timetables. Different constraints and objective functions from ITC2007 exam competition rules are adopted, as it is a complex real word exam timetabling problem. Finally, the system is tested on the ITC2007 exam benchmark dataset, and test results are presented. The main aspect of the system is to deliver an easy-to-handle tool that can generate quality timetables based on institutional demands and smoothly manage several key components. These components are collecting data associated with the enrolment of students in exams, defining hard and soft constraints, and allocating times and resources. Overall, this software can be used as a commercial scheduler in order to provide institutions with automated, accurate, and quick exam timetable.

Highlights

Solving the examination timetable of an academic institution induces lots of complicacies due to the intractable nature of the problem
Whether the timetabling system is viable in solving examination timetabling correctly, it has been tested with eight instances of ITC2007 exam dataset
Graph heuristic saturation degree graph heuristic (SD) is used for producing the initial solution, and three local search meta-heuristics are used individually for optimizing the initial solutions in the improvement phase

Summary

Introduction

Solving the examination timetable of an academic institution induces lots of complicacies due to the intractable nature of the problem. The aim was to develop an open, generic tool that employs distributed architecture for cooperative scheduling and supports users to monitor modeling of time, resource, university activities, and constraints for producing a quick feasible solution. The aim was to develop an intelligent commercial scheduler that can replace human decision-makers as well as produce high-quality solutions for University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) examination timetabling problem. Chunbao and Nu [17] developed an efficient exam scheduling system (IIEESS v1.0) that avoids the traditional direct-clash-checking approach and schedules a large number of exam papers within a few minutes Another recent software solution is solving the University of Toulouse examination timetabling problem using integer linear programming [18]. The authors claimed that the tool can produce quality solutions automatically and give some flexibility to choose input data and constraints

Objectives

Results

Conclusion